> At an estimated cost of $500 million to switch Interac to something like > the chip and PIN system in the UK they can afford to lose a few customers > here and there.
When I use Interac/debit here in Ontario, I have to enter my PIN number. What's the difference between our Interac and the UK Chip and PIN?? Why is skimming possible here but not possible there?
. NTP is not one of the usual patent squatter cases, it's my understanding that in this case RIM is the big bad bully.
NTP bought the patent from someone who actually did try and set up a business selling things very much like blackberries, but they did it in the early 90's.
The ability of the very first inventor to sell his patent (after trying very very hard himself to make a go of it and not doing so well) is a fundamental part of what made the first inventor willing to invest so much time and energy into attempting to invent something new.
NTP did not dream this up from thin air and patent it themselves after the fact. Someone else worked very very hard trying to get it going, they're the ones who got the patent that NTP ended up with. It's the original inventor's choice to sell his patent for a few million after failing to establish a business instead of waiting himself 10 years to see if anyone does anything useful with his idea.
Remember, in the beginning NTP was perfectly willing to license the original inventor's idea for just a few dozen million. The only reason RIM ended up getting slammed for a half billion is that they behaved really really badly, like a pack of assholes and weasels and bullies, and the judge finally laid down the law and punished them for it. Remember, knowingly infringing a patent is much much worse than not knowingly infringing it.
I'm not arguing that the patent system isn't often used in the way you describe - it's definitely broken. Just look at the idiotic legalese that patents are written in. As a physicist I generally have no fucking idea what most software patents are describing. That's not right.
If I hook up a 1MW power supply to a 1MW capable speaker and blast it at the school, yeah, I might be guilty of something. If I encourage 10,000 other people to meet me outside the school and all yell at the top of our lungs, we're guilty of FUCK ALL.
This is insane. Hopefully the kid gets a good lawyer and a competent judge. Even a half competent judge should do. Hopefully the judge doesn't get confused by the claim of "cybervandalism" and have his eyes glaze over - which clearly happened to the prosecutor.
BTW: Do they elect their prosecutors down there? That's just idiotic too. It should be based on competence. Not public popularity.
. A lot of the clubs and bars in Toronto often have their urinals filled with ICE. You don't hit the flush button, your urine melts just the right amount of ice to flush itself away. Very clean. Very nice looking. No smell since it is washed away and the ice cold keeps odors down too. Very cool.
But I betcha it requires a "high traffic" zone to be cost effective - as opposed to letting the ice sit there for eons.
Most awful smelling bathroom I've been to lately - an otherwise VERY nice 4 story restaurant/lounge in Dublin, had a trough for the urinal - smelled like *hell* since the trough had a flat bottom and as such didn't drain all that quick.
And I think the rest of you are a bunch of Uncle Tom type loosers to have "adopted" the words yourselves.
When I was young these were words used to denigrate me, make me feel like less of a human being. When other people who would not use those terms to describe themselves - use those terms to describe others - it is NOT complimentary. It is "ooooh look at that strange stupid silly ugly cute thing." It's not quite as vindictivly used as when they were young and immature, but they might as well be saying "OOOH LOOK AT THAT FAT CHICK".
I am not a strange animal to be leered at, made fun of, or ostracised. I am a human being capable of doing some things that most people are not as comfortable doing - and that's it.
I'm a techie. I'm not just another human being, I'm better than they are. But I'm not going to hold it against them. So life didn't deal them the brains or experience to deal with technical things. Big deal.
Yeah I had a few molars sealed when I was a kid. They eventually come off - I think mine lasted 10 years or something.
My dentist says that it's very rare for an adult to get a cavity on top of the teeth. When you're an adult the most likely place for a cavity is in between the teeth, where they are close together and/or touching. Hence the need for flossing.
Of course perhaps I should have had those seals renewed - I ended up getting a couple fillings in the first couple years of University... Since then nothing.
There's definitely some genetics involved.
My gums don't bleed when brushing or anything, and I've brushed before bed my entire life (and flossed as well religiously starting in University). However my gums bleed when the dentists "test" them for gum health (poke them to see how much space there is hidden below the gumline along the teeth). They claim I need to brush and floss 3 times a day after each meal, but that's just SO much work. One dentist mentioned that there is evidence that people with freckles and/or red hair are predisposed to have more finicky/bleeding gum problems (I've got freckles). So there might not be anything I can do about it. I had braces for a year in high school, and I do have a receeded gum line that might be related to that, and/or that might be because I should have been brushing and flossing 3 times per day.
> Add the fact that you can distribute the end app as a single exe, > or an exe and a few custom DLLS, and MS access means no external > dependencies.
Hee hee hee, until the person/persons* who are developing the GUI use a feature or three that are all in external DLLs that just happen to be in their environment, and then BANG, you find yourself hunting down these other DLLs that aren't documented but for which access complains it needs to function for your database queries.
(*) Person is typically management, and once they've put in functionality and come to depend on it, no way in hell can you rip it out.
> corporate power centers have incentives ($) to make good decisions.
Your statement is factually flawed. It should read:
Corporate power centers have incentives to make decisions that make money.
It's only through strong regulation that we make sure that their deicisons don't stray into "bad" and "evil". Often we have to usurp their decision making in order to fulfil "the common good".
> The ad hominem virtually overwhelms any merit to be found > in the more relevant (and quite valid) point against the > life vs. property/money concept.
Uhhh, no it doesn't. It doesn't detract at all from the rest of the more relevant arguments.
He's not making an argument about the drug licensing issue. He's explaining the "the whole world hates us, why?" issue - which many Americans are completely incapable of understanding.
> The reference endorsing the 9/11 attacks is particularly > appalling and counterproductive.
No it's not. We need more references to why people hate the USA - and American's seem to pay more attention when we link it to 911. It's the only way they might learn why people hate them, and stop doing things that make so many people hate them.
I'll make a stab at another one. Not only does the USA place corporate profit above preventing pain and misery and massive epidemics, but the USA forces countries into trade agreements AND THEN refuses to abide by them on a case by case basis when it's not to their advantage. Example: wood products. Canada has an infinite supply of trees and as such the market value for the "logging rights" is near zero. What does the US do? Why they scream and moan that the Canadian logging industry is "subsidized" and they throw up tarrifs. It's not our fault your country has so few trees that your logging rights are expensively auctioned off putting your logging companies at a competitive disadvantage. It's also not our fault that those few tree-wealthy US states create an artificial scarcity of logging rights by auctioning off so few zones per year.
Are the northwest passagees all 14 or more miles wide all the way through?
You know, all the times I've heard about this on CBC, no-one has ever discussed the specifics of why we/they think one thing or another. I betcha if someone would just answer that very question in open public in Canada - the issue might just disappear.
IE: "The world standard for international waters is 7 miles off shore, the northwest passage is/is-not wider than 14 miles wide and thus does/does-not fall within the standard definition of being international waters."
Of course there is a corollory question - everywhere else in the world where large numbers of islands of a nation are as closely spaced as those in the Canadian North - what do those countries contend the waters inbetween those islands are? IE: Are there exceptions to the 14 miles wide rule for a channel between islands?
. Your argument is a logical fallacy. It does not disprove a link between CO2 and temperatures on earth, it simply shows that it's not as simple and straight forward as you'd wish. If there was a 1:1 correspondence between CO2 and temperature anywhere, figuring this all out would be a piece of cake.
The fact that there isn't a 1:1 correspondence does not mean that there is no effect. It just means that the timescale and other factors affecting temperatures over the course of 5-30 years is not insignificant.
I find it absurd that you are attempting to discredit something using a 30 year timescale when all of the scientific community is studying data covering a half million years to try and figure out how big the CO2 effect is.
Finally looking at the chart you quoted, you are doing something that every newbie BSc/MSc student does - you are giving a huge weight to minor jigs and jags in a graph. I look at that graph, and I see an upward trend over the past 120 years. At most we can say there is a dip of some type between 1960 and 1990 - geeze, wonder what caused that, maybe there are other mechanisms that affect how warm the earth is? You figure? The existence of other things (say a volcanoe lowering temps for 10 years) doesn't disprove a link between CO2 and temperature.
What I love about the American viewpoint towards Kyoto is the whining child like "if they won't do it then I won't either", along with the obstinate expectation that just because everyone else in the world isn't industrialized yet they shouldn't ever be allowed to have an industrialized first world emission level. A real adult would realize that it's not a valid excuse to do nothing ourselves. How can we ever ask them (once they are getting fully industrialized) to keep their emissions down when you've spent another 50 years with no restrictions? You want to wait until they're as bad as you to finally have everyone agree to the same targets? Idiotic and short sighted. .
. Oh no way! So instead of downloading 9.5 GB of porn and uploading 0.5 GB, you're FORCED by the evil "ratio nazi's" to only download 5 GB or porn and upload 5 GB to someone else.
THE BASTARDS!!!!
> I have to strictly control the amount of traffic I transmit and receive
Yes, yes you'll have to do that in BOTH CASES.
I'm sorry you live on the ass end of the world oh so far away. Please note that everyone else is still jealous of you because you've got such kickass weather*, huge long nice beaches, and a more relaxed balanced work ethic compared to say, oh, Canada. Honestly if you want to let us all move down there and join you, then we won't have to use those f'ing trans-pacific cables and your rates will go WAY WAY down.
(*) Or maybe I'm thinking of Australia. What's the weather like in NZ? Got lots of beaches?
Not a homeowner, so don't mind my impertinent question... but:
I usually think of a deck as something that's raised up off of the ground and/or covered. Yours seems to be just a near-level with the grass surface to stand on. Why not simply grow grass and... walk on that?
I guess a pain to maintain? The grass under the table/etc would not grow/do-well because it's shaded, then you have to move everything when you want to mow, etc etc.
Too cool, although I would have thought that the farmers would have noticed the strange drying pattern - presuming that is a true-color image and not some kinda false-color.
But scanners are fscking slow - I don't want to spend a full 1-2 minutes per page scanned. And images scanned are always covered in dust dots! (Latter is extremely bad for pictures with lots of black/dark areas in them.)
What I want to do is buy a mechano set and a couple lights and set up a stable photo tower, and set my computer to get my camera to take a picture every 2 seconds, and I can just sit there turning the pages of all the crap I have to scan.
Okay, here's a question I have - in the years since I bought my Microtek ScanMaker X6, have scanner speeds gotten any (significantly) better? Or have they just claimed higher and higher resolutions? Higher resolutions are pointless, I don't want/need 100 MB images. All I need is 1600x2400 jpgs per 8x11 page or there-abouts.
And the company that implements this and charges TRIPLE the competitors rate is going to get business from your friends HOW? By saying "if a hurricane strikes"... what? They'll more easily be able to tell grandma smith that they're one of the 99.999% of people who are still alive?
People who make six-figure salaries cannot afford homes within 50 miles of the District.
Tell me about it.
12 miles north of the core of Toronto is North York, a nice looking newly built 2000 sq ft house there is $950,000 CDN. Houses of a similar size in western Canada in smaller cities are between $180,000 CDN and $450,000 CDN - depending on how elaborate they are and their location. The 450 I'm thinking of has a huge amount of vaulted ceilings and SPECTACULAR views of a huge park it sits on. You couldn't find that for less than 1.5-2 million CDN in Toronto. Not unless it's less than 1000 sq ft, 40+ years old, and on a 30 ft wide lot.
. You mix some truths with boogey man stories and scare tactics - making it hard for people to discern whether you know what you're talking about or not.
We can thus conclude that the key-determining factor in the setting of US interest rates is the amount of US excess money supply. Over time this excess is predominantly driven by the supply of money, which is set in motion by the Fed's monetary policies. In this respect the Chinese factor is completely irrelevant as far as US interest rate determination is concerned. So if the economy were to fall into a recession on account of a bursting of the housing bubble we should blame the Fed for that and not falsely point the finger at China.
the fact that demand for oil equates to the demand for US buck (an artificial link maintained by the US through its unbelievable military might)
Pardon? "Unbelievable Military Might"? In the research I do, it's all "currency of choice", no one's being forced to trade for oil in USD. I know the company I work for merely *chooses* to price our products in USD for convenience. I think you've got your economics ass backwards. You should be relating the power of the dollar to the supply of oil. The more powerful the dollar, the more drilling there is for oil, the more oil there is for everyone else. The opposite also holds true. (http://www.mees.com/postedarticles/oped/a47n33d01 .htm - http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/P100650.asp)...and of course oil being used so intensively to GENERATE products and deliver them to market, the lack of availability and high price of oil itself could cause bad things.
The way in which oil/USD *might* be linked is that if everyone else stops using USD for oil right now and the link between USD deflation and oil availability is severed it means that more resources will be available to drill for oil and more oil (should) be available. Which will actual DECREASE the economic problems.
. A patent doesn't prevent anyone from implementing ideas, it just means they have to license it from you.
Your customers/etc would be fucking idiots to use their own patents to crush the develompent of the field that you've got rights to.
Or do you think you'll magically find one company that can do things right and make the field as big as it possibly can be? That's totally impossible, unless you let a few different implementers fight it out, no one will capture the right mix of features/usability/etc/etc that will get big.
Hee hee, I had never thought of that before. Some of these leeches may be shooting themselves in the foot! Patenting something then being so overbearing and/or "MINE MINE MINE" as to squash the development of the market for the very thing they've got patented.
BTW: Yeah, I'm with everyone else on the big huge FUCK YOU and those that hired you.
If there are patents, where are the fucking implementations? .
. The banking idea was one of the stupidest ones there - and you need to have the right experience to know why.
Do you have ANY IDEA how hard it is to convince big banks to trust (aka risk) their data/business with YOUR software? Not only that, but big banks have huge internal development groups and user groups which are direly threatened by any such proposal, which means immediately you have some hugely powerful enemies. And then finally there is the massive question of "ok, if our data is in your systems, and competitor bank B's data is in your systems, how do we know FOR SURE that they won't ever ever ever get a peek at our data?".
And on and on and on. I already know of startups that have written huge back-office systems meant to replace the bank's own proprietary written software - instead of the bank spending 50 million over the next 5 years for upgrades/maintenance/redevelopment, they buy "commodity" software built by the startup that only costs $2 million per year. They're kicking and screaming trying to get banks to trust them and try out the software.
HENCE the VC's 2nd "requirement" from you - "Second, it's important to persuade one or two major banks to partner with you to get the project moving".
DUH motherfucker!! If I already have that, why the fuck do I need the VC's money? If I'm someone with connections like that, I probably already have money of my own.
And I have no idea how the VC thinks he's going to pull it off with 10 developers. The amount of customization that banks will require is astounding.
To some of the other commenters/posters - some of the ideas require reading through to understand what they are really asking for, for example the last idea, the convergence one. Yes that sets off your buzzword alarm, however read the last few sentences and notice what he's really asking for. Something that allows a SEAMLESS transition for VOIP/IM/TV/Web access between devices in your home. If you're chatting with whats-her-name on PC #1 and you want to go into the kitchen where your fridge has VOIP too, how do you transfer the call? etc etc. It's not a bad/hard requirement. Of course the thing that ruins his idea is - who the hell needs this any time soon? Who is he selling it to?
The "SOCIAL NETWORKS MEET THE TOWN CRIER" idea is golden. I've been dying to see that happen. I live in Toronto, and do you know how hard it is to find LIVE up to the moment news here? I could see a pall of smoke on the horizon or notice that a section of the subway system has shut down, but there's NOTHING that will tell me wtf is going on, not unless it's big enough to force TV channels to break into programming, or worse force a national network to mention it - and I don't have TV at work anyways. Hell I don't have TV at home:) The local "news radio" and "cablepulse 24" do NOT have life feeds of news, they just feel like they do. CablePulse 24 just takes a thrice daily newscast and repeats it every 15 minutes. News radio might make a 15 second mention of something, but who the fuck wants to listen to radio?
I want wiki-google-news for my town. And I want all 2 million of us to be entering the news and enhancing the stories. In realtime. From our phones/pda's. I want volunteer editors to be receiving "on the scene reports" and typing up segments. (Hell I could do that for 10 minutes on my lunchbreak) etc. etc. Course you'll need moderation/trust systems - to prevent crackpots from screwing with things. But it's a damn cool idea if enough people would contribute news/articles.
I was actually more impressed (or rather not as unimpressed) by these VC ideas than I thought I would be.
You are correct, VC's just have money. Thing is they don't *want* to take just 3 million and then "go it by themselves", because each of them has 60 million! They want to be involved in 20 different exciting 3 million dollar projects. And these people aren't idiots. They're technical people who made 60 million dollars, and now aren't coding themselves. They also learn a SHITLOAD as the years pass and they do their jobs.
It's not the VC's lack of savy that causes 1/10 things to fail, it's the market dummy. Well, that and pure out and out competition. .
Slashdot Mirror
> At an estimated cost of $500 million to switch Interac to something like
> the chip and PIN system in the UK they can afford to lose a few customers
> here and there.
When I use Interac/debit here in Ontario, I have to enter my PIN number. What's the difference between our Interac and the UK Chip and PIN?? Why is skimming possible here but not possible there?
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No that's not true. They hate us all. They've just decided to try and kill you first because you're causing the most trouble for them :)
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NTP is not one of the usual patent squatter cases, it's my understanding that in this case RIM is the big bad bully.
NTP bought the patent from someone who actually did try and set up a business selling things very much like blackberries, but they did it in the early 90's.
The ability of the very first inventor to sell his patent (after trying very very hard himself to make a go of it and not doing so well) is a fundamental part of what made the first inventor willing to invest so much time and energy into attempting to invent something new.
NTP did not dream this up from thin air and patent it themselves after the fact. Someone else worked very very hard trying to get it going, they're the ones who got
the patent that NTP ended up with. It's the original inventor's choice to sell his
patent for a few million after failing to establish a business instead of waiting himself 10 years to see if anyone does anything useful with his idea.
Remember, in the beginning NTP was perfectly willing to license the original inventor's idea for just a few dozen million. The only reason RIM ended up getting slammed for a half billion is that they behaved really really badly, like a pack of assholes and weasels and bullies, and the judge finally laid down the law and punished them for it. Remember, knowingly infringing a patent is much much worse than not knowingly infringing it.
I'm not arguing that the patent system isn't often used in the way you describe - it's definitely broken. Just look at the idiotic legalese that patents are written in. As a physicist I generally have no fucking idea what most software patents are describing. That's not right.
$50 per hour? That's damn cheap. Guess it was just low level sysadmin work though.
If I hook up a 1MW power supply to a 1MW capable speaker and blast it at the school, yeah, I might be guilty of something. If I encourage 10,000 other people to meet me outside the school and all yell at the top of our lungs, we're guilty of FUCK ALL.
This is insane. Hopefully the kid gets a good lawyer and a competent judge. Even a half competent judge should do. Hopefully the judge doesn't get confused by the claim of "cybervandalism" and have his eyes glaze over - which clearly happened to the prosecutor.
BTW: Do they elect their prosecutors down there? That's just idiotic too. It should be based on competence. Not public popularity.
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A lot of the clubs and bars in Toronto often have their urinals filled with ICE. You don't hit the flush button, your urine melts just the right amount of ice to flush itself away. Very clean. Very nice looking. No smell since it is washed away and the ice cold keeps odors down too. Very cool.
But I betcha it requires a "high traffic" zone to be cost effective - as opposed to letting the ice sit there for eons.
Most awful smelling bathroom I've been to lately - an otherwise VERY nice 4 story restaurant/lounge in Dublin, had a trough for the urinal - smelled like *hell* since the trough had a flat bottom and as such didn't drain all that quick.
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And I think the rest of you are a bunch of Uncle Tom type loosers to have "adopted" the words yourselves.
When I was young these were words used to denigrate me, make me feel like less of a human being. When other people who would not use those terms to describe themselves - use those terms to describe others - it is NOT complimentary. It is "ooooh look at that strange stupid silly ugly cute thing." It's not quite as vindictivly used as when they were young and immature, but they might as well be saying "OOOH LOOK AT THAT FAT CHICK".
I am not a strange animal to be leered at, made fun of, or ostracised. I am a human being capable of doing some things that most people are not as comfortable doing - and that's it.
I'm a techie. I'm not just another human being, I'm better than they are. But I'm not going to hold it against them. So life didn't deal them the brains or experience to deal with technical things. Big deal.
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Their product webpage is crap too. http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?id=5562 182&siteID=123112 Along the right side they've got 6 links - each one is a separate flash application - just to draw the link a bit more pretty.
> I also heard some talk about sealants.
Yeah I had a few molars sealed when I was a kid. They eventually come off - I think mine lasted 10 years or something.
My dentist says that it's very rare for an adult to get a cavity on top of the teeth. When you're an adult the most likely place for a cavity is in between the teeth, where they are close together and/or touching. Hence the need for flossing.
Of course perhaps I should have had those seals renewed - I ended up getting a couple fillings in the first couple years of University... Since then nothing.
There's definitely some genetics involved.
My gums don't bleed when brushing or anything, and I've brushed before bed my entire life (and flossed as well religiously starting in University). However my gums bleed when the dentists "test" them for gum health (poke them to see how much space there is hidden below the gumline along the teeth). They claim I need to brush and floss 3 times a day after each meal, but that's just SO much work. One dentist mentioned that there is evidence that people with freckles and/or red hair are predisposed to have more finicky/bleeding gum problems (I've got freckles). So there might not be anything I can do about it. I had braces for a year in high school, and I do have a receeded gum line that might be related to that, and/or that might be because I should have been brushing and flossing 3 times per day.
> Add the fact that you can distribute the end app as a single exe,
> or an exe and a few custom DLLS, and MS access means no external
> dependencies.
Hee hee hee, until the person/persons* who are developing the GUI use a feature or three that are all in external DLLs that just happen to be in their environment, and then BANG, you find yourself hunting down these other DLLs that aren't documented but for which access complains it needs to function for your database queries.
(*) Person is typically management, and once they've put in functionality and come to depend on it, no way in hell can you rip it out.
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> corporate power centers have incentives ($) to make good decisions.
Your statement is factually flawed. It should read:
Corporate power centers have incentives to make decisions that make money.
It's only through strong regulation that we make sure that their deicisons don't stray into "bad" and "evil". Often we have to usurp their decision making in order to fulfil "the common good".
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> The ad hominem virtually overwhelms any merit to be found
> in the more relevant (and quite valid) point against the
> life vs. property/money concept.
Uhhh, no it doesn't. It doesn't detract at all from the rest of the more relevant arguments.
He's not making an argument about the drug licensing issue. He's explaining the "the whole world hates us, why?" issue - which many Americans are completely incapable of understanding.
> The reference endorsing the 9/11 attacks is particularly
> appalling and counterproductive.
No it's not. We need more references to why people hate the USA - and American's seem to pay more attention when we link it to 911. It's the only way they might learn why people hate them, and stop doing things that make so many people hate them.
I'll make a stab at another one. Not only does the USA place corporate profit above preventing pain and misery and massive epidemics, but the USA forces countries into trade agreements AND THEN refuses to abide by them on a case by case basis when it's not to their advantage. Example: wood products. Canada has an infinite supply of trees and as such the market value for the "logging rights" is near zero. What does the US do? Why they scream and moan that the Canadian logging industry is "subsidized" and they throw up tarrifs. It's not our fault your country has so few trees that your logging rights are expensively auctioned off putting your logging companies at a competitive disadvantage. It's also not our fault that those few tree-wealthy US states create an artificial scarcity of logging rights by auctioning off so few zones per year.
Go fuck yourselves.
PS: I supported the war in Iraq.
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Three miles? I thought it was seven.
Are the northwest passagees all 14 or more miles wide all the way through?
You know, all the times I've heard about this on CBC, no-one has ever discussed the specifics of why we/they think one thing or another. I betcha if someone would just answer that very question in open public in Canada - the issue might just disappear.
IE: "The world standard for international waters is 7 miles off shore, the northwest passage is/is-not wider than 14 miles wide and thus does/does-not fall within the standard definition of being international waters."
Of course there is a corollory question - everywhere else in the world where large numbers of islands of a nation are as closely spaced as those in the Canadian North - what do those countries contend the waters inbetween those islands are? IE: Are there exceptions to the 14 miles wide rule for a channel between islands?
-A Canuck.
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Your argument is a logical fallacy. It does not disprove a link between CO2 and temperatures on earth, it simply shows that it's not as simple and straight forward as you'd wish. If there was a 1:1 correspondence between CO2 and temperature anywhere, figuring this all out would be a piece of cake.
The fact that there isn't a 1:1 correspondence does not mean that there is no effect. It just means that the timescale and other factors affecting temperatures over the course of 5-30 years is not insignificant.
I find it absurd that you are attempting to discredit something using a 30 year timescale when all of the scientific community is studying data covering a half million years to try and figure out how big the CO2 effect is.
Finally looking at the chart you quoted, you are doing something that every newbie BSc/MSc student does - you are giving a huge weight to minor jigs and jags in a graph. I look at that graph, and I see an upward trend over the past 120 years. At most we can say there is a dip of some type between 1960 and 1990 - geeze, wonder what caused that, maybe there are other mechanisms that affect how warm the earth is? You figure? The existence of other things (say a volcanoe lowering temps for 10 years) doesn't disprove a link between CO2 and temperature.
What I love about the American viewpoint towards Kyoto is the whining child like "if they won't do it then I won't either", along with the obstinate expectation that just because everyone else in the world isn't industrialized yet they shouldn't ever be allowed to have an industrialized first world emission level. A real adult would realize that it's not a valid excuse to do nothing ourselves. How can we ever ask them (once they are getting fully industrialized) to keep their emissions down when you've spent another 50 years with no restrictions? You want to wait until they're as bad as you to finally have everyone agree to the same targets? Idiotic and short sighted.
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Oh no way! So instead of downloading 9.5 GB of porn and uploading 0.5 GB, you're FORCED by the evil "ratio nazi's" to only download 5 GB or porn and upload 5 GB to someone else.
THE BASTARDS!!!!
> I have to strictly control the amount of traffic I transmit and receive
Yes, yes you'll have to do that in BOTH CASES.
I'm sorry you live on the ass end of the world oh so far away. Please note that everyone else is still jealous of you because you've got such kickass weather*, huge long nice beaches, and a more relaxed balanced work ethic compared to say, oh, Canada. Honestly if you want to let us all move down there and join you, then we won't have to use those f'ing trans-pacific cables and your rates will go WAY WAY down.
(*) Or maybe I'm thinking of Australia. What's the weather like in NZ? Got lots of beaches?
Not a homeowner, so don't mind my impertinent question... but:
... walk on that?
I usually think of a deck as something that's raised up off of the ground and/or covered. Yours seems to be just a near-level with the grass surface to stand on. Why not simply grow grass and
I guess a pain to maintain? The grass under the table/etc would not grow/do-well because it's shaded, then you have to move everything when you want to mow, etc etc.
(Very cool big-ass shade thingie btw!)
Too cool, although I would have thought that the farmers would have noticed the strange drying pattern - presuming that is a true-color image and not some kinda false-color.
8 &spn=0.006426,0.007318&t=k&hl=en
Nearby - wtf is this?
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=44.893298,10.36541
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But scanners are fscking slow - I don't want to spend a full 1-2 minutes per page scanned. And images scanned are always covered in dust dots! (Latter is extremely bad for pictures with lots of black/dark areas in them.)
What I want to do is buy a mechano set and a couple lights and set up a stable photo tower, and set my computer to get my camera to take a picture every 2 seconds, and I can just sit there turning the pages of all the crap I have to scan.
Okay, here's a question I have - in the years since I bought my Microtek ScanMaker X6, have scanner speeds gotten any (significantly) better? Or have they just claimed higher and higher resolutions? Higher resolutions are pointless, I don't want/need 100 MB images. All I need is 1600x2400 jpgs per 8x11 page or there-abouts.
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Why don't we expand our arbratry safety standards into the realm of radio telecommunications?
Where the fuck did you get the idea that things are arbitrary? Do you even know what the fucking word means?
Just my $0.02,
No, it'll be $20 dumbass.
HELLO!! MCFLY!?!? SHIT COSTS MONEY!!!!!
dumbasses. No I'm not apologizing, where the fuck do these morons come from?
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And the company that implements this and charges TRIPLE the competitors rate is going to get business from your friends HOW? By saying "if a hurricane strikes"... what? They'll more easily be able to tell grandma smith that they're one of the 99.999% of people who are still alive?
People who make six-figure salaries cannot afford homes within 50 miles of the District.
Tell me about it.
12 miles north of the core of Toronto is North York, a nice looking newly built 2000 sq ft house there is $950,000 CDN. Houses of a similar size in western Canada in smaller cities are between $180,000 CDN and $450,000 CDN - depending on how elaborate they are and their location. The 450 I'm thinking of has a huge amount of vaulted ceilings and SPECTACULAR views of a huge park it sits on. You couldn't find that for less than 1.5-2 million CDN in Toronto. Not unless it's less than 1000 sq ft, 40+ years old, and on a 30 ft wide lot.
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m l
1 .htm - http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/P100650.asp) ...and of course oil being used so intensively to GENERATE products and deliver them to market, the lack of availability and high price of oil itself could cause bad things.
You mix some truths with boogey man stories and scare tactics - making it hard for people to discern whether you know what you're talking about or not.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/MoneySupply.ht
http://www.mises.org/story/1837
We can thus conclude that the key-determining factor in the setting of US interest rates is the amount of US excess money supply. Over time this excess is predominantly driven by the supply of money, which is set in motion by the Fed's monetary policies. In this respect the Chinese factor is completely irrelevant as far as US interest rate determination is concerned. So if the economy were to fall into a recession on account of a bursting of the housing bubble we should blame the Fed for that and not falsely point the finger at China.
the fact that demand for oil equates to the demand for US buck (an artificial link maintained by the US through its unbelievable military might)
Pardon? "Unbelievable Military Might"? In the research I do, it's all "currency of choice", no one's being forced to trade for oil in USD. I know the company I work for merely *chooses* to price our products in USD for convenience. I think you've got your economics ass backwards. You should be relating the power of the dollar to the supply of oil. The more powerful the dollar, the more drilling there is for oil, the more oil there is for everyone else. The opposite also holds true. (http://www.mees.com/postedarticles/oped/a47n33d0
The way in which oil/USD *might* be linked is that if everyone else stops using USD for oil right now and the link between USD deflation and oil availability is severed it means that more resources will be available to drill for oil and more oil (should) be available. Which will actual DECREASE the economic problems.
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http://www.google.ca/search?q=mfg
http://www.google.ca/search?q=mfg'r
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A patent doesn't prevent anyone from implementing ideas, it just means they have to license it from you.
Your customers/etc would be fucking idiots to use their own patents to crush the develompent of the field that you've got rights to.
Or do you think you'll magically find one company that can do things right and make the field as big as it possibly can be? That's totally impossible, unless you let a few different implementers fight it out, no one will capture the right mix of features/usability/etc/etc that will get big.
Hee hee, I had never thought of that before. Some of these leeches may be shooting themselves in the foot! Patenting something then being so overbearing and/or "MINE MINE MINE" as to squash the development of the market for the very thing they've got patented.
BTW: Yeah, I'm with everyone else on the big huge FUCK YOU and those that hired you.
If there are patents, where are the fucking implementations?
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:) The local "news radio" and "cablepulse 24" do NOT have life feeds of news, they just feel like they do. CablePulse 24 just takes a thrice daily newscast and repeats it every 15 minutes. News radio might make a 15 second mention of something, but who the fuck wants to listen to radio?
The banking idea was one of the stupidest ones there - and you need to have the right experience to know why.
Do you have ANY IDEA how hard it is to convince big banks to trust (aka risk) their data/business with YOUR software? Not only that, but big banks have huge internal development groups and user groups which are direly threatened by any such proposal, which means immediately you have some hugely powerful enemies. And then finally there is the massive question of "ok, if our data is in your systems, and competitor bank B's data is in your systems, how do we know FOR SURE that they won't ever ever ever get a peek at our data?".
And on and on and on. I already know of startups that have written huge back-office systems meant to replace the bank's own proprietary written software - instead of the bank spending 50 million over the next 5 years for upgrades/maintenance/redevelopment, they buy "commodity" software built by the startup that only costs $2 million per year. They're kicking and screaming trying to get banks to trust them and try out the software.
HENCE the VC's 2nd "requirement" from you - "Second, it's important to persuade one or two major banks to partner with you to get the project moving".
DUH motherfucker!! If I already have that, why the fuck do I need the VC's money? If I'm someone with connections like that, I probably already have money of my own.
And I have no idea how the VC thinks he's going to pull it off with 10 developers. The amount of customization that banks will require is astounding.
To some of the other commenters/posters - some of the ideas require reading through to understand what they are really asking for, for example the last idea, the convergence one. Yes that sets off your buzzword alarm, however read the last few sentences and notice what he's really asking for. Something that allows a SEAMLESS transition for VOIP/IM/TV/Web access between devices in your home. If you're chatting with whats-her-name on PC #1 and you want to go into the kitchen where your fridge has VOIP too, how do you transfer the call? etc etc. It's not a bad/hard requirement. Of course the thing that ruins his idea is - who the hell needs this any time soon? Who is he selling it to?
The "SOCIAL NETWORKS MEET THE TOWN CRIER" idea is golden. I've been dying to see that happen. I live in Toronto, and do you know how hard it is to find LIVE up to the moment news here? I could see a pall of smoke on the horizon or notice that a section of the subway system has shut down, but there's NOTHING that will tell me wtf is going on, not unless it's big enough to force TV channels to break into programming, or worse force a national network to mention it - and I don't have TV at work anyways. Hell I don't have TV at home
I want wiki-google-news for my town. And I want all 2 million of us to be entering the news and enhancing the stories. In realtime. From our phones/pda's. I want volunteer editors to be receiving "on the scene reports" and typing up segments. (Hell I could do that for 10 minutes on my lunchbreak) etc. etc. Course you'll need moderation/trust systems - to prevent crackpots from screwing with things. But it's a damn cool idea if enough people would contribute news/articles.
I was actually more impressed (or rather not as unimpressed) by these VC ideas than I thought I would be.
You are correct, VC's just have money. Thing is they don't *want* to take just 3 million and then "go it by themselves", because each of them has 60 million! They want to be involved in 20 different exciting 3 million dollar projects. And these people aren't idiots. They're technical people who made 60 million dollars, and now aren't coding themselves. They also learn a SHITLOAD as the years pass and they do their jobs.
It's not the VC's lack of savy that causes 1/10 things to fail, it's the market dummy. Well, that and pure out and out competition.
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